Microsoft Power BI, Analysis Services, MDX, DAX, M, Power Pivot and Power Query

Creating Surveys using Excel 2013 Forms

Jamie Thomson and I share a number of… obscure enthusiasms. For instance, last week when he spotted the new forms/surveys feature in the Excel 2013 Web App (see here for a mention) he knew I’d be excited. And I was. Excited enough to devote a whole blog post to them.

What is this feature? Basically a rip-off of homage to the Google docs functionality I mentioned here that allows you to create simple questionnaires and save the data back to a spreadsheet. To use it you need to create a new Excel spreadsheet in the Excel Web App (I can’t seem to find it in desktop Excel and it may not even exist there), then click on Form/New Form in the ribbon:

This opens a new dialog where you can create your form/survey:

It’s all pretty self-explanatory from there, you just enter a title and description and then some questions, which can be various types (returning text, numbers, multiple choices etc):

You can then answer the questions yourself or send a link out to other people so they can too:

Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work. Whether this is a temporary problem or a limitation with Office 365 (as opposed to on-prem Sharepoint) I don’t know… if someone knows how to make it work, though, I’d be much obliged if you could leave a comment.

UPDATE: First of all, if you can’t see the survey don’t worry – the service seems to be very unreliable. Secondly I’ve got the OData feed working now and will blog about it later.

Hmm, well I don’t know for sure whether this is related to different editions of Office 365, but I’m using Professional Plus and it’s the only thing I can think of. There was an option to use Home or Professional Plus when I signed up, and I chose the latter: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh973391.aspx

Yes I am using skydrive.live.com. The link below shows how to do this but its a little older version. I’ve seen a few other tutorials do it as well. Im just asking everyone everywhere until I get a solution

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As well as being a blogger, I'm an independent consultant specialising in Analysis Services, MDX, DAX, Power BI, Power Query and Power Pivot. I work with customers from all round the world solving design problems, performance tuning queries and delivering training courses, and I am happy to work on short-term engagements. For more details see http://www.crossjoin.co.uk